BuckeyeBlog

Over at Reason Online there is a great article debunking the latest fad in advancing the nanny state — mandatory nutritional labeling in restaurants:

Americans may say they would also like to see dietary information on menus. But providing it costs money, in a fiercely competitive industry. If patrons really wanted such disclosures, no law would be needed. Restaurants, eager to attract customers, would already be providing the numbers—just as they strive to offer other things that bring in business. …

The belief that more facts will generate wiser decisions is appealing but, at least in the realm of food, yet to be proved. No one seems to have noticed that as nutritional labeling has expanded, so have American waistlines. The federal government first required packaged foods to carry such information in the mid-1970s, and today, we are collectively fatter than we were then.

What does that suggest? Either people don’t notice what’s in the food they buy, or they don’t let the knowledge affect what goes in their mouths. …

There is little research to suggest that calorie alerts will make any difference in obesity rates. In 2004, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine reported that when women of normal weight were given this kind of information, it had no effect on what they ate, and that facts furnished in restaurants were also irrelevant in dining decisions.

A study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that people who dine out frequently are less likely to pay attention to nutritional data than people who eat mostly at home. It suggested that “those who have a less nutritious diet are less likely to use food labels and have less interest in doing so.”

The AP reports that the central government of the People’s Republic of China is requiring its agencies cut spending by 5% in response to the recent earthquake. Compare that to the $1.5 billion spending increase Ohio’s politicians are currently pursuing in the name of “stimulating” our state’s economy.

A country raised on Mao’s Little Red Book shames Ohio’s political class through its vigorous embrace of limited government.

As S.B. 57, passed by the Ohio Senate, gears up in the Ohio House, there’s little doubt that the teachers unions, Democrat party and Gov. Ted Strickland will be angling toward the veto. The bill would establish scholarships for students with disabilities.

Strickland’s view is, “Funding private schools with public tax dollars deprives the state and its taxpayers of proper oversight .”

Yep. Proper oversight.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, a few free individuals are allowed to do what actually works, rather than report to bureaucracies and do the happy dance when their ignorance ratios move from 56 percent to 55 percent. Teachers, students, parents and those who care about getting actual things done for actual children have opened a school that avoids patterns in the decoration, installs obscuring, movable screens over mirrors – all things that are important to autistic students.

Autistic students gained their ability to benefit from funds spent for them several years ago, thanks to efforts by many people, including state Rep. Jon Peterson, R-Delaware.

Too bad students with other disabilities won’t be able to do the same.

If you watch any of the cable news shows you may have seen Naomi Klein on them recently, discussing her book The Shock Doctrine. In it she makes the claim that Milton Friedman was essentially an enabler of dictators around the world and that he and his followers fomented crises in order to deregulate markets and thereby plunder the wealth of these nations. Anyone who has read Friedman knows this is ridiculous, but Klein has become a celebrity on the statist circuit for telling those audiences what they want to hear.

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In following the debate about payday lending before the Senate Finance Committee this week, particularly the effort of Sen. Jeff Jacobson (R., Dayton) to impugn the motives of our scholar witness through innuendo and insinuation, I am reminded of what our friend Larry Reed of the Mackinac Center wrote in Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy:

Too often today, policymakers give no thought whatsoever to the general state of liberty when they craft new policies. If it feels good or sounds good or gets them elected, they just do it. Anyone along the way who might raise liberty-based objections is ridiculed or ignored.